The Ends of Solidarity: Discourse Theory in Ethics and Politics

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State University of New York Press, 2009 M01 1 - 276 páginas
Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory demands that human beings see themselves in relations of solidarity that cross national, racial, and religious divides. While his theory has won adherents across a spectrum of contemporary debates, the required vision of solidarity has remained largely unexplored. In The Ends of Solidarity, Max Pensky fills this void by examining Habermas's theory of solidarity, while also providing a comprehensive introduction to the German philosopher's work. Pensky explores the impact of Habermasian discourse theory on a range of contemporary debates in politics and ethics, including the prospect of a cosmopolitan democracy across national borders; the solidarity demanded by the integration process in the European Union; the demands that immigration dynamics make on inclusive democratic societies; the divisive or unifying effects of religion in Western democracies; and the current controversies in genetic technology.

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The Adventures of a Concept between Fact and Norm
1
2 No forced UnityCosmopolitan Democracy National Identityand Political Solidarity
33
Studies in Immigration Law and Policy
65
The Dynamics of Immigration and the Constitutional Project of the European Union
103
5 Brussels or Jerusalem?Civil Society and Religious Solidarity in the New Europe
139
Discourse Ethics
175
Genetic Technologies Philosophical Anthropology and the Ethical SelfUnderstanding of the Species
207
Notes
239
Index
259
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Página 247 - The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union, the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States ; and the people of each State shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties,...
Página 247 - State shall, in every other, enjoy all the privileges of trade and commerce," etc. There is a confusion of language here which is remarkable. Why the terms free inhabitants are used in one part of the article, free citizens in another, and people in another; or what was meant by superadding to "all privileges and immunities of free citizens," "all the privileges of trade and commerce," cannot easily be determined. It seems to be a construction scarcely avoidable, however, that those who come under...
Página 145 - The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, nondiscrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.
Página 249 - In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, We, the people of Eire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial, Gratefully remembering their heroic and unremitting struggle to regain the rightful independence of our Nation...
Página 247 - But were an exposition of the term "inhabitants" to be admitted which would confine the stipulated privileges to citizens alone, the difficulty is diminished only, not removed. The very improper power would still be retained by each State, of naturalizing aliens in every other State. In one State, residence for a short term confirms all the rights of citizenship: in another, qualifications of greater importance are required.
Página 29 - Politics" is conceived as the reflective form of substantial ethical life, namely as the medium in which the members of somehow solitary communities become aware of their dependence on one another and, acting with full deliberation as citizens, further shape and develop existing relations of reciprocal recognition into an association of free and equal consociates under law.
Página 247 - ... all the privileges of free citizens of the latter: that is, to greater privileges than they may be entitled to in their own state; so that it may be in the power of a particular state, or rather every state, is laid under a necessity, not only to confer the rights of citizenship in other states, upon any whom it may admit to such rights within itself, but upon any whom it may allow to become inhabitants within its jurisdiction. But were an exposition of the term " inhabitants" to be admitted,...
Página 95 - Civil society is composed of those more or less spontaneously emergent associations, organizations, and movements that, attuned to how societal problems resonate in the private life spheres, distill and transmit such reactions in amplified form to the public sphere.
Página 197 - Thus the perspective complementing that of equal treatment of individuals is not benevolence but solidarity." This principle is rooted in the realization that each person must take responsibility for the other because as consociates all must have an interest in the integrity of their shared life context in the same way. Justice conceived deontologically requires solidarity as its reverse side.

Acerca del autor (2009)

Max Pensky is Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning; editor of The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern, also published by SUNY Press; and translator and editor of Habermas's The Past as Future: Vergangenheit als Zukunft.

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